Student ProjectsNorthwestern Baja Society of Automotive Engineers 2025-2026 Car
Project Manager
Lochlan McGinnis, Northwestern Baja
Amount Requested
$5,000
Summary
Northwestern Baja is a student-run team that designs, builds, and races off-road cars every year. The club provides an opportunity for over 50 engineering students to apply the knowledge they learn in the classroom to a real-life project. We race with over 100 teams from other universities around the globe in the Baja SAE competition run by the Society of Automotive Engineers. We develop our practical engineering skills, including solid modeling, design for manufacturing, computer-aided manufacturing, welding, and engineering analysis. This project also requires our team to rely on one another and provides a real-world environment within which to learn collaboration, communication, leadership, and management.
This past year, we took over 30 students to our competition in Marana, Arizona, where we completed 10 laps in the 4-hour endurance race. To continue providing this incredibly unique, invaluable experience for our members, we need to continue pushing ourselves in what we can accomplish. The Murphy Scholars have always been incredibly helpful to Baja, and this coming year, we hope to use the funds to do more frequent testing of our vehicles that can provide us with data for better design, and to purchase better components and tooling.
Northwestern Baja has proved year after year to be a vastly educational and formative experience for our members, and we hope that, with your contribution, we can continue that experience for the coming year.
Planned Activities/Investments
This past year, we built our most innovative car to date, and we want to refine that design to produce a vehicle that is even faster, more efficient, and durable. We implemented an electronic transmission system and a four-wheel drive disconnect. We hope to build upon the electronic team, so we can include a broader range of engineering disciplines.
Last year, we began a tradition of a meticulously planned month-long training curriculum with resources that allowed our new members to fly into the designing and participating with confidence. This year, we hope to fine-tune our program for more efficient training to get people designing their projects quickly and to accommodate more people as we expect the team to continue to grow dramatically.
Our aggressive timeline last year proved useful, allowing us to test, break, fix, and innovate our designs. We will push to have our work done more than a month before our competition, leaving us more time for testing and tuning. We also believe that our engineering is now stronger so we can fully take advantage of at our current driving skill. As such, we hope to allow our drivers to gain more experience to fully push our cars to the limits and gain a competitive edge in competition.
Impact
Northwestern Baja has an intensive design, build, and test cycle that allows members to experience invaluable whole-brain and hands-on engineering in a real-world environment. Baja both complements and extends beyond the information gleaned in engineering classes, presenting realistic engineering situations with memorable lessons. As a result, members of the team develop a strong foundation in the design and manufacturing process in addition to confidence in their ability to communicate clearly and work in a team setting. This emulates work at real engineering companies where communication and collaboration are key.
Additionally, Baja always prioritizes giving back to the Northwestern engineering community. Since many of our members are shop trainers, we can pass on the design and manufacturing knowledge that is gained through Baja not only to other members but to all Northwestern engineers. We also show off our car during E-week, Wildcat Welcome, and the all-car team meeting to inspire new engineers at Northwestern.
Deliverables
Our major deliverable is an off-road car that places well in the endurance event at the competition. We have found that these races are designed to break car components after repeated impacts, so durability is the most crucial factor in determining performance. In 2021, we placed 6th with a car that was slow but strong. In 2023, our car was just as durable while being 20% lighter, 30% faster, and placed 8th against much fiercer competition. This year, we aim to build a car that not only survives the competition but is designed to be ergonomic, easy to maintain, and fast.
Sustainability
Baja has continuously been supported for the last few years by a mixture of the Murphy Grant, McCormick grants, and donations from friends. We are constantly working to make our club’s finances run more efficiently and to acquire new sponsors as our team grows. We believe that our club will continue to grow, not only sustaining our team with excitement and energy, but also allowing us to advance further than we ever thought possible. We have also developed a very organized and reliable method by which to pass on our engineering, management, financial, and administrative knowledge, and we actively instill the importance of the transfer of knowledge and maintaining written records so that Baja remains sustainable.
Each year, Northwestern Baja fundraises about $35,000 from various sponsors and other contributions in order to pay for things such as vehicles, tooling, supplies, travel expenses, competition fees, and more. We’ve been continuously improving our outreach and have established relationships with many of our sponsors. With the help of the Murphy Society, we have been able to build a great car, and we see a lot of potential in the cars we build in the future.
Previous Projects
We built a brand new car for the 2024-2025 school year, which we raced in competition this year in Marana, AZ. We placed 41st overall among schools across the country and around the world. We also presented our design in front of industry judges, earning us 30th.
Budget Overview
Frame: $4,030
The frame is the core of the car that everything is mounted to. We purchase our tubes from VR3 Engineering, then weld them ourselves. Our frame cost $4030 in total last year. We plan to use a similar frame design with a possibly slightly higher cost.
Rod Ends: $955.35
Rod ends are joints that allow the wheels of the car to turn. We use 8 rod ends in total, two for each of the wheels. In total, these cost us $955.35 last year, which we expect to repeat again.
Total Budget Amount: $5,000
Faculty Adviser/Department
Bob Taglia/Segal Design Institute